Smy Victoria, Seeby Helen, Patrick John
a School of Psychology , Cardiff University , Cardiff , UK.
Ergonomics. 2015;58(6):942-52. doi: 10.1080/00140139.2014.1001447. Epub 2015 Jan 30.
This paper examines the effects of different types of complexity facing novice designers in constraint satisfaction tasks. The nature of the complexity in a design task was varied by manipulating different aspects of the extrinsic constraints, which refer to restrictions concerning how design components can be assembled. We investigated the effect of the number of constraints (Study 1) and the number of different types of constraint (Study 2) in a simulated office design task. Results indicated that tackling a design task with a greater number of constraints, or more types of constraint, resulted in decrements in performance. Study 3 examined the effect of reasoning about constraints that involved a fixed location in the office layout and those that did not. It was found that having a higher proportion of constraints that referenced a fixed location led to better design performance. The theoretical and practical aspects of these results are discussed. Practitioner summary: This paper identifies sources of constraint complexity facing the novice designer in an office design task. Three features of constraints proved problematic: the number of constraints, the number of types of constraint and whether the constraint involved a specific location. Training and decision support solutions are discussed.
本文考察了新手设计师在约束满足任务中面临的不同类型复杂性的影响。通过操纵外在约束的不同方面来改变设计任务中复杂性的性质，外在约束是指有关设计组件如何组装的限制。我们在一个模拟办公室设计任务中研究了约束数量（研究1）和不同类型约束的数量（研究2）的影响。结果表明，处理具有更多约束或更多类型约束的设计任务会导致性能下降。研究3考察了对涉及办公室布局中固定位置的约束和不涉及固定位置的约束进行推理的影响。结果发现，涉及固定位置的约束比例越高，设计性能越好。本文讨论了这些结果的理论和实践意义。从业者总结：本文识别了新手设计师在办公室设计任务中面临的约束复杂性来源。约束的三个特征被证明是有问题的：约束数量、约束类型数量以及约束是否涉及特定位置。文中还讨论了培训和决策支持解决方案。
